Puerto Rico, today, is in the worst crisis that America has seen in living memory. Millions of Americans on the island are struggling desperately with no electricity, few public services, and severe shortages of food, potable water, medicine, and shelter. It’s a humanitarian disaster, and it’s being woefully…

I spent Tuesday at a fascinating conference* in Silicon Valley, which came complete with roughly the level of inchoate enthusiasm about things like blockchain technology that you might expect. (Note to techno-utopians: No, bitcoin is not obviously helpful in Venezuela right now. Even if everybody in the country had a…

What would you say if I were to tell you that you could make the world a better place by spending an extra $1,500 a year at the grocery store? Perhaps you would say that, for all that you believed in the cause, you really didn’t have $1,500 to spend supporting it. Which is fair enough: That’s a substantial chunk of…

Matt Levine really likes the Cliff Asness take on socially responsible investing. Which, in short, says that if virtuous people avoid a stock, then the price of that stock will fall, thereby increasing the returns reaped by the people who aren’t virtuous and who buy it.

Giving cash to the needy is the simplest and most effective form of charity – one which has stood the test of millennia. Gussied up as “unconditional cash transfers,” it’s now changing the world of development and philanthropy, and being embraced by the likes of the International Rescue Committee and many others.

There’s a disaster in the world, so, sure as night follows day, the Red Cross fundraising machine has groaned back into action, helped by millions of well-meaning individuals on various social media platforms. The pictures of devastation are all over the TV, people want to Do Something, and all too often the first and…

I just spent a lovely weekend in the Berkshires, which included (of course) a stop at the Berkshire Museum. My trip coincided with the publication of an open letter from the museum’s president, Buzz McGraw, where she says that while she understands the “shock, sadness and anger” which greeted her decision to sell of…

Most charitable donations are made by middle-class individuals, not by billionaires or charitable foundations. And as we all know, the middle class is stretched, with families living from paycheck to paycheck. If you ask people to make a donation today, you’re asking them to pull money from the same account they use…

The US government is going to give $51.8 billion to charity this year. Not directly: it doesn’t have an army of technocrats deciding which charities get $1,000 and which get $100 million. Instead, it just has the charitable tax deduction.

The Berkshire Museum has now hired extra crisis-PR help. So here are a few ideas about what it should do next, on the messaging front. The tl;dr: try engaging your critics a little bit, and being much more honest about the realities you’re facing and the trade-offs you are making.

Disclosure: I’m a Mooch foe of long standing. He first tried to get me fired in January 2011, after I wrote this post, and he once told Kevin Roose that “Felix Salmon, he gets readership, but he’s universally hated. I think even his wife hates him.”

Never let it be said that nothing substantive ever comes out of expense-account boondoggles like the Black Corporate Directors Conference. Every so often, a well-placed question can result in positive changes worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Rich people often target their philanthropic donations in the direction of other rich people. Warren Buffett gives billions to Bill Gates; Reid Hoffman gives millions to Mark Zuckerberg. When it’s done well (and Buffett has done it well), this can be an extremely effective exercise in allocative efficiency.